Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

turingtribe.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 96 posts

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#81

Post by drusepth »

umeshunni wrote: post #73
caprese wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Onlive - required other people's infrastructure and a hardware play, and a software client. Playstation Now - required Sony to buy/use a cloud service, maintain it, and expensive Sony hardware just as a force of habit. Google - negligible instance running on their existing infrastructure, maintained under existing processes, playable on chromecasts already in hotels and homes everywhere, alongside browsers and mobile…

> playable on chromecasts already in hotels Are there actually Chromecasts in hotels? I have never seen one and curious which chains have them.

The hotels I've seen them in (in the US) have been Hampton, Hyatt, and Mariott. I might've seen one in a Sheraton, but don't quote me on that (and if so, only once). Definitely seems to be per-hotel rather than brand-wide, though.

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#82

Post by penagwin »

babuskov wrote: post #76
andy_ppp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do find HN to be against sarcasm of any kind, which in it's own way is slightly ironic. I enjoyed your comment [1] and consequently upvoted it! [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19433773

That was sarcasm? I though he was serious and upvoted. I can imagine walking down the street in Call of Duty game or something like Cyberpunk 2077 and seeing ads overlaid on wall textures of buildings.

A while ago PUBG plastered ads for their Berlin Invitational. While they were ads related to the game, the incrementally added them EVERYWHERE!

First they're on a bus-stop wall, that's thematic okay. Then they're on random walls - getting annoying. Then the loading screen and the parachutes, nows it's annoying. Like, guys I'm from the US and I don't want to go to your stupid competition!

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#83

Post by petra »

nprateem wrote: post #80
cwyers wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still have to do all the work of building the geometries for the art assets, are you really saving that much on not having to color/texture those assets?

Come on, think bigger. If they're doing this for art styles you can bet your bottom dollar they'll be doing something using Google images. No longer having to actually create 3D meshes - just a Google image search, click a button and have the geometries automatically created for you. Then just add an automatic style.

>> Come on, think bigger.

True.

Actually Google is just seeing the wealth of innovation in procedural generation and in computer creativity, knowing where this is going, and just want in on the action.

And since as a cloud gaming provider, they stand to make much more money than tool vendors, their incentive is much bigger.

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#84

Post by bilbo0s »

muststopmyths wrote: post #62
heavenlyblue wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying Google doesn’t need to maintain an expensive cloud infrastructure for it as opposed to Playstation? The only reason they can do that today without specialised hardware a-la OnLive is because Nvidia and co. now have specialised GPU circuits allowing one to stream the encoded video output to memory. When OnLive started they had to do it themselves. I don’t believe you have any idea what you are speakin…

> Nvidia and co. now have specialised GPU circuits allowing one to stream the encoded video output to memory. Could you clarify what you (and the comments mentioning NVENC below) are talking about ? As far as I understand it, NVENC and the ilk are solutions that capture video output and encode it to H264. So they are x264 encoding accelerators, nothing more. If you were running a datacenter this way, you'd be much be…

>What would be interesting is if they bypass the video display output phase completely and render the finished framebuffers to memory...

That's exactly what NVENC, Capture SDK, AMD's AMF, and Intel's QuickSync do. Just encode the framebuffer output of whatever game engine you're using with one of those API's. (And remember to make sure your game engine license allows you to use it that way. As always, if you use Unity, you're out of luck, they specifically forbid you from doing this.)

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#85

Post by BeefySwain »

muststopmyths wrote: post #62
heavenlyblue wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you implying Google doesn’t need to maintain an expensive cloud infrastructure for it as opposed to Playstation? The only reason they can do that today without specialised hardware a-la OnLive is because Nvidia and co. now have specialised GPU circuits allowing one to stream the encoded video output to memory. When OnLive started they had to do it themselves. I don’t believe you have any idea what you are speakin…

> Nvidia and co. now have specialised GPU circuits allowing one to stream the encoded video output to memory. Could you clarify what you (and the comments mentioning NVENC below) are talking about ? As far as I understand it, NVENC and the ilk are solutions that capture video output and encode it to H264. So they are x264 encoding accelerators, nothing more. If you were running a datacenter this way, you'd be much be…

Thank you for this. I was thinking that my understanding of NVENC was completely wrong based on what the sibling posts are positing.

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#86

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #72
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I wonder if there's potential in something like this for accessibility purposes. If you have one of the many variations of color-blindness, for instance, could such a restyling be helpful? Could other neurological disabilities be similarly aided by dynamically restyling visuals?

There are many low-tech solutions that can be applied instead of shoehorning in neural networks for this purpose.

Yes, but they also require active participation from the developer and many developers are unwilling or unable to spend the time to implement them, especially when there's a rather large range of disabilities to account for.

It's possible that tech like this could offer a user-definable solution to these issues.

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#87

Post by anonytrary »

lwb wrote: post #3

To me this was the least interesting part of the Stadia reveal. State share was the real innovation imo. Would any serious game studio use style transfer ml to actually replace their visual artists? Didn't seem like the quality was there. That said, it is an awesome PoC. Just not something I see being practically applicable.

I was baffled with the style transfer announcement. It seems arbitrary, random, and out-of-place. Style transfer (applied to art) is really neat, but I can't see it being used to re-clothe games for production.

Before I get downvoted, yes I do think it could be useful for prototyping and conceptualization during development, but I doubt anyone would actually ship a complete game with the entire camera view transformed by style transfer.

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#88

Post by avinium »

make3 wrote: post #57
currymj wrote: post #50

this is certainly just a neat gimmick, but it's interesting to me for a particular reason: the Stadia box uses an AMD GPU, and per the Google announcement, all the style transfer is done in real time. this suggests that we may soon have better AMD support in TensorFlow.

Tensorflow support on AMD is supposedly not awful anymore. https://medium.com/tensorflow/amd-rocm-gpu-support-for-tenso... I wish someone who had >actual It's an important question.

I've been following ROCm development closely, and everything I read is pointing towards it being a first class competitor to CUDA.

That being said, I don't have any personal experience because, well, I don't have AMD GPUs to play around with.

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#89

Post by alkonaut »

chris_mc wrote: post #74
alkonaut wrote: post #67

The useful application for AI in streamed gaming seems like it would be for predicting the next 30ms to avoid input lag. This seems gimmicky at best. Prediction has to take place on the client though - so the challenge is making it cheap.

I am not a game developer, but couldn't you make a multiplayer game more fair in this situation by adding artificial lag into everyone's controls to match the highest lag person? Just limit it to a certain amount, like no more than 200-300ms.

I wasn’t considering fairness here (that’s a whole different can of worms). Even for a game where everyone’s lag is the same, X milliseconds of input lag and Y milliseconds of network latency is painful for some values of X and Y. For fast paced games I’d say X is probably just a couple of frames (15-30ms) and Y is about 100ms.

Re: Google Stadia uses Style Transfer ML to change video game art in real time

#90

Post by pier25 »

lwb wrote: post #3

To me this was the least interesting part of the Stadia reveal. State share was the real innovation imo. Would any serious game studio use style transfer ml to actually replace their visual artists? Didn't seem like the quality was there. That said, it is an awesome PoC. Just not something I see being practically applicable.

> Would any serious game studio use style transfer ml to actually replace their visual artists?

I doubt that was the point. IMO it is more of a palette testing tool.

Post reply on HN